1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to electronic document management, and more particularly to ensuring the currency of distributed or published information.
2. Related Art
Documents are commonly used to distribute or convey information. Most documents today may be stored in electronic form and managed by a document management system. Documents may take many different forms, such as academic papers, design drawings, specifications, etc. For a document to be useful it must be distributed to individuals that need access to the information it contains. Many times this means that the document will become remote from the author. The author then no longer has any control over the document or the information contained therein.
For example, a specification for a product to be manufactured may be created by an engineer. The engineer's copy of the specification is the original master document. The engineer may distribute copies of the specification to people in the product marketing department or others. The engineer no longer has control over the copies of the specification. The engineer does not know what use others are making of the specification's contents. Furthermore, the engineer may not even know who has the specification. The marketing person may have sent the specification to others, who may have distributed the document even further.
If some key information is inadvertently omitted from the master document and this information is later added to the original master document, there is no way for others who have the distributed version of the document to realize that there is a newer version of the document available.
Established methods available to insure that the most up to date information is available include many manual processes that put the burden to validate the freshness of data on the information consumer. These methods do not provide the publisher of the information any assurance that the correct information is being used. Many of the current processes require that personal contact information be included with the published document. The information consumer is required to contact someone to insure that they have the latest information. Other processes require that detailed records be kept of everyone that has received the information. The publisher manually contacts everyone that has received the information whenever updates are produced. In some cases, when the publisher releases the information, they guess what the useful lifetime of the information is. Then they establish an expiration date for the information. The information may include labels such as “This information valid through MM/DD/YY”. Information distributed electronically may automatically expire. If the information consumer tries to open the published document after the expiration date the published document viewer will inform the user that the information has expired, regardless of whether the information is still actually valid.
What is needed then is an improved approach to ensuring currency of published information that overcomes shortcomings of conventional solutions.